Modern day diet programs and plans promise weight loss results that sound very appealing. If you're looking to lose some fat, there's a good chance you're looking for a fast weight loss diet to help you do this. Low carb diets are one example of such diets and involve drastically limiting your intake of carbohydrate foods.
Some of these fast weight loss diets have phases where you lower your carb intake to the point where your body goes into a state called "ketosis" and switches from using carbs for energy to using fat. Such diets include the Atkins Diet and the South Beach Diet. This is an unnecessary extreme and will leave you lacking many important nutrients, not to mention being very difficult to stick to.
What no-one tells you is that it's only realistic for your body to lose two pounds a week of fat and anything else you lose on a fast weight loss diet will be either muscle or water loss. Not only is this very bad for your health but your body uses up fewer calories as you lose muscle. Water loss also causes you to become dehydrated, since your body is 75% water.
In addition to the above, fast weight loss diets have many other side effects. For starters, when you suddenly change your diet and start eating less than normal this may trigger your body's starvation response. When this occurs your body wants to conserve its energy and doesn't want to let go of your body fat, which means your fat loss will slow down to a halt.
Another factor to consider is that it is very likely that you will re-gain any weight you lost on a fast weight loss diet when you complete your diet. This is due to the extremely restrictive nature of low-carb diets which can result in cravings and subsequent binges as you fall back into your old way of eating, and is also due to the muscle loss which slows down your metabolism.
Some fast weight loss diet programs promise very optimistic results but charge you lots of money for the shakes and food bars which are a "necessary" part of the program. What's more, 95% of dieters put the weight they lose back on, and end up going back on a diet. How would you feel if you invested hundreds of dollars every month on a fast weight loss diet, and then put it all back on when you got off the diet?
The key to successfully and permanently losing the fat is not to drastically lower calories, nor to label carbs as evil and avoid them like the plague, as many fast weight loss diets advocate. Instead, you will get more effective results by changing your eating habits and eating smaller, but more frequent meals and cutting way back on processed, fatty and high-sugar foods.
If you want to lose the fat naturally and safely you cannot do this with fast weight loss diets. Rather, this requires changing your eating habits for the better so to not pack on more fat, and regularly exercising which should involve aerobic exercise to strip the fat off as well as resistance training to help build muscle. If you do this instead of going on a fast weight loss diet, you will find your metabolism speeding up and the fat melting off without any water or muscle loss.
